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Yet heres one thing I worry about: As we celebrate these ballot efforts, theres a risk that we downplay the threat drugs pose. As Ive written, a quarter of the kids on my old school bus in Oregon are dead from drugs, alcohol or suicide deaths of despair so I strongly believe that decriminalizing drugs should not lead to any relaxation about their dangers.

Under the new Oregon measure, manufacturing or selling drugs will still be crimes, but possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine would be equivalent to a traffic ticket. The aim is to steer people into treatment so that they can get help with their addictions.

That focus on treatment, which Oregon will fund with marijuana taxes, is critical. Seattle has in effect decriminalized possession of hard drugs, by exercising prosecutorial discretion, but it never adequately funded social services for people wrestling with substance abuse. That has led to a backlash among voters irritated by open drug use.

We did miss the boat here in Washington State when we licensed cannabis, Dan Satterberg, the prosecutor in King County, which includes Seattle, told me. We should have dedicated much more of the tax revenue to building a better public health response to our behavioral health crisis. The states that are just getting into the pot business should learn from our mistake.

The new Oregon law is modeled after one in Portugal, which pioneered decriminalization and has emphasized treatment of those with addictions. As a result, Portugal now has, along with Greece, one of the lowest drug fatality rates in Western Europe. I visited Portugal a few years ago to report on its drug situation, and I found that while no narcotics policy works as well as we might hope, Portugals succeeds much better than others.

I hope other states will also experiment with addressing addiction through public health measures. A useful next step would be to provide safe injection sites, thus saving lives of many people who now die from overdoses.

Criminalization of drugs in the United States has failed by every metric, notes Alex Kral, an epidemiologist with the nonprofit RTI International. Oregons new policy offers us a much needed opportunity to evaluate alternatives to criminalization of drugs.

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Republicans and Democrats Agree: End the War on Drugs - The New York Times